Consultative selling for eight industries

Context

Each industry the division sold into had a value proposition, but it lived inside one salesperson’s own deck, built up over years and adapted for whatever meeting came next. Slides written for the parent group sat next to slides written for the division, and next to industry news added whenever it seemed relevant. Many of the case studies in those decks told a recovery story: a problem the company had caused, then put right. Those stories show resilience, but they make a modest opening for a pitch, and they were the most common kind.

The objective

A sales rep walking into a meeting needs three things ready: a sharp read of the customer’s industry right now, a reason to choose the company that is specific to that industry, and proof that it has done the job before for a customer like the one across the table. That had to work the same way for every sector the division served (luxury fashion and retail, consumer, auto-mobility, technology, chemicals, life sciences and healthcare, engineering and manufacturing, aerospace and aviation) and live in one shared format any rep could pick up.

What I did

I started from what each sector already had. The parent group runs several businesses side by side, and the forwarding division is one of them. So a single deck could hold messages written for the whole group, for the division and for the industry, each true at its own level. I proposed one template to put them in order, the same for every sector:

1. Industry trends
2. Logistics trends
3. The customer’s challenge right now
4. What we do about it
5. The value proposition
6. Products and solutionsanchored on a silver bullet
7. Case studies

The silver bullet is the one solution built for that industry: sometimes an established product, sometimes a digital tool, most often a combination only a forwarder with global reach could put together.

To fill the template with something true, I ran a workshop with each sector’s representatives, built on the Value Proposition Canvas. I broke its broad categories into narrow questions and statements drawn from their day-to-day work, so a room of practical people could react to the specifics they knew best.

Value Proposition Canvas: Strategyzer AG, strategyzer.com

Their answers, checked against what each sector still sold, became one value proposition per sector on four pillars: sustainability as a constant, the other three specific to the industry.

Then I turned to the case studies, the proof behind every pitch. To get a steady supply of strong ones, I designed an intake form for sales and account managers. Short fields took the key figures; longer ones took the customer’s challenge, what the team did and the benefits it delivered. Each completed form became a case-study slide in one format for every sector, quick to read and easy to drop into any deck. Because the form opened with the customer’s challenge, every story started from the customer’s need and showed the company getting it right.

Case study intakeSheet 1

fx

AB

1Sector

2Headline

3Customer challenge

4Benefit 1

5Benefit 2

6Benefit 3

7Benefit 4

8How we did it

9SKUs per year

10Volume per year

11Weight per year

12Lanes

IntakeFiguresNotes

Fashion & Retail sector deck7 / 7

Fashion & Retail

Global fashion brand develops business and scales operations to 260+ new stores with minimal infrastructure investment

Connected to 250 suppliers through 10 logistics providers, the brand needed one centralized solution for air, ocean, road, rail and express shipments to the 130+ stores acquired through a new licensing agreement, with another 130 openings in the pipeline.

The benefits delivered for the brand

One point of contactFor all worldwide purchase order flows

One IT solutionVisibility of purchase orders and pick-to-store allocation

Compliance supportCustoms brokerage and regulatory knowledge in asia

15+ custom reportsMilestones from purchase order to proof of delivery

How we made it happen

• Created a vendor-to-store transport and store distribution service
• Connected 250+ vendors worldwide to one regional hub, cross-docking in six markets
• Enhanced store delivery and returns management
• Developed in-country warehousing for store props across four countries

Scale of the brand’s supply chain (yearly)

3 mil.SKUs15k + 4kTEUs + CBMs10kTonsHKto SG, MY, TW, CN and MO

The outcome

• 8sectors, each with its own value proposition
• 5–10case studies per sector
• 1template behind every sector's deck

The template, the workshop process and the case-study format outgrew me: they became the seed of a global sector-content hub, later handed to a dedicated sales enablement team to run. It’s still active today, refreshed every year, and the case-study format still shows up in every sector’s deck. Sector content from it also fed into cross-divisional content hubs on the public website in selected markets. This work also led to my place on the division-wide value-proposition project.

Skills and tools

Strategy

• Value-proposition design
• Messaging across group, division and sector
• Workshops built on the Value Proposition Canvas

Design

• Sales slide design
• One-pager design

Enablement

• Intake forms for sales teams
• Case-study process design
• Sales enablement